The title of "You Fell (Bad Craftsman Mix)" was supposed to be a winking reference to the fact that it sounds kind of like the band Tool. It ended up being an ironic commentary on my own workmanship, as this was by far the most agonizing remix to put together.

Both conceptually and technically, the seed for "Bad Craftsman" was the immensely heavy guitar in the original version of "You Fell." I was interested in trying to re-work this element into a full-length exploration - partly because the guitar riffs in "You Fell" are so badass, and partly because a live-sounding, instrumental heavy metal power-trio performance is one of the last things people would think of when the notion of a "remix" is mentioned.

So, production-wise, the first and foremost step came by taking the guitar parts from the original version of "You Fell," chopping them up into different fragments, and then copying, shuffling, and combining those fragments into different patterns, so that new guitar parts could be generated from the old ones. (The same approach was done with Tobe Ramsey's bass lines.) Some guitar lines, which were almost inaudible on the original version, became prominent melodic parts, and in many sections they were flipped backwards to further differentiate them from the original versions.

Different sections of drum performances (from both "You Fell" and "Truth") showed up at various parts of the remix as well; I'd pick from one song or the other, depending on the kind of musical gesture I was looking for (or, as was sometimes the case, a particular drum part would end up inspiring the creation of a new cut-and-paste guitar line to compliment it.) On the whole, I'm pretty happy with the way the "Truth" and "You Fell" drums co-exist in "Bad Craftsman."

Speaking of which, here's a fun little detail: If you listen closely, you can tell which drum parts came from "Truth" - they're the ones where the snare drum sounds noticably "smaller" and "tighter." This is because the original song "Truth" was played at a considerably slower tempo than "You Fell," so in order to bring the first tune's drums up to the second song's speed, they had to be digitally time-compressed. One audible result of this process is that every individual drum hit is shorter, because the audio waveform for the entire recorded performance was truncated in order to squeeze into the faster speed of "You Fell." This happened to all of the drumkit elements, of course, but it's most obvious on the snare hits. Compared to the bigger, "plusher" snare sound from the original drum performance of "You Fell" (which didn't have to undergo any timestretching for this remix, as "Bad Craftsman" retains the original tempo of "You Fell"), it's almost as if the drums are jumping back and forth between the early '70s and the late '80s in terms of their recorded aesthetic.

All good and fine, so far. So why would the most natural-sounding, least overtly electronic remix be the most painstaking to assemble?

Many of the most common sonic fingerprints of electronic music are things that out-and-out flaunt the stitched-together aspect of the music's creation. When you fear filtered and chopped-up drum beats, sampled sounds that loop over and over, giant reverbs and echoes washing over the stereo spectrum, and other sonically outlandish elements, what you're basically hearing is the artificiality of the recording medium being flaunted. That is, you're hearing sonic elements that don't - and couldn't - exist in nature.

The very notion of recorded sound - the idea that a musical performance can be frozen and re-played in exactly the same manner, every single time - is a fundamentally unnatural thing. When you start talking about electronic music production, it's really significant to consider that there's an awful lot of cutting-and-pasting that goes on in the creation of "regular" musical recordings: a typical rock band album, for instance, involves hours and hours of playing the same three-minute parts over and over, keeping just a few seconds of any particular pass, until the "perfect" take is arrived at. Vocalists can punch-in individual lines, words, or even syllables in a song, until they get it just so. Guitarists will frequently stitch together different performances - Eddie Van Halen and David Gilmour are two epochal rock guitar players who would sometimes record several different takes of guitar solos, and then switch between different sections of different takes during the mixdown, to "create" the final version of the solo through post-performance editing.

So in a lot of ways, the thing that seperates a "live"-sounding recording from a "cut-and-pasted" or "electronic" one may not necessarily be the amount of "editing" that's involved in creating the final product. It could instead be a question of how transparent and natural-sounding - or, how tweaked and chopped-up - the final result is intended to sound. Put simply, it's often a question of whether you want to hide the seams, or flaunt them.

Masking those seams becomes a lot more challenging, though, when the entire musical creation is basically one giant piece of patchwork. Making a part sound natural and organic is one thing when you have a live musician sitting in the studio, playing different parts of a line with the explicit intent of making it sound live; it's a very different prospect to take a bunch of sliced-and-diced fragments of a recording and try to make the unnaturally stitched-together result sound natural.

Furthermore, if a live musician plays a part several times in a row, there will be microscopic little fluctuations in the performance each time they play that part. This isn't a bad thing at all - it's one of the things that makes a live musician irreplacable, and it's something that different listeners will be able to identify on different levels of awareness. By the same token, this is a big part of what made the early work of industrial-metal acts like Ministry so striking - they were playing live guitar riffs, but then cutting-and-pasting them so that the exact same performance kept hammering the listener over the head. I wanted the parts on "Bad Craftsman" to sound less like that, and more like a "real" guitar part, and at a certain point I went back and re-constructed a lot of the guitar parts by using different individual repetitions of Shawn's original parts, so that the repetitions of the "Bad Craftsman" lines would have subtle variations from one repetition to another, and (hopefully) be less immediately obvious in their stitched-together origin.

The guitars weren't the only bits that underwent this sort of scrutiny; pretty much every element in "Bad Craftsman" was sweated over. I can't bear to try and remember all of the gory details, but here's one example: there are a few parts where tom-tom fills from "Truth" happen simultaneously with completely different full-kit drum fills from "You Fell." Seriously, folks: that's pretty fucked up, even by my standards.

There's a joke about how "every hairdresser knows that it takes at least an hour to achieve the 'natural look'." With "Bad Craftsman," I was going for the ultimate natural-look remix: I wanted to create a track that sounded like a live band recording of a brand-new song - in this case, a seriously aggressive heavy metal instrumental - and I wanted the innumerable edits and production tricks I employed in creating this new piece to be transparent to the listener. I don't know natural the final result is, but I do know it took one hell of a lot longer than the proverbial hour that the typical hairdresser tries to steel themselves for.

But I think it was worth it: "Bad Craftsman" is one the most un-remix-sounding remixes I've ever heard. It's truly a collaborative effort: the guitar parts on the remix may have been my making, but they were entirely dependant on Shawn's original guitar parts in their creation (and, indeed, each of the original musician's parts and performances proved to be essential compositional points of inspiration). I also get a kick out of the fact that Shawn and I are both enormous "Star Wars" geeks, and this sort of digital post-performance tweaking is something that reminds me a lot of the post-performance cinematography George Lucas has used on the prequel trilogy. (And I'll grant you that the prequel trilogy is pretty shaky ground to be basing conceptual comparisons on; I sure hope this track leans closer to Darth Maul than Jar Jar.)

And last but not least, if I do say so myself: it's a pretty fucking badass heavy metal tune. For a piece of music that's basically the production equivalent of Frankenstein's Monster, I utterly dig that the final result sounds akin to that rampaging harbinger of doom.

Andre LaFosse
14 December 2005